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Show creators, tired of the crazy wing of your fanbase? Here’s how to get rid of them.

I bet that if producers/writers knew that this was a quick and easy way to put crazy fangirls off of their fandom they would have done it a long time ago.

So there’s this show called Supernatural. I don’t watch it but I do know that it’s about two brothers who investigate supernatural goings on. I also know that the actors who play these brothers are hotties. And the show has a pretty intense fanbase. That was the extent of my knowledge until recently.

Since I don’t watch this show, I was unaware until a little bit ago that a lot of the fanfic written for it is slash between the two brothers. Yes. Slash. In the fandom it’s called Wincest because their last names are Winchester.

After this episode aired, apparently the fandom became extremely not happy. They didn’t like the depiction of fangirls (as crazy, crazy people who are crazy) and they particularly didn’t like the brothers refering to incest slash as “sick”.

I’m going to pause a moment and let that sink in.

The fandom is upset because the characters they love (and the writers who create them) are not down with incest.

Yeah.

Anyway, seems many fangirls are saying they are so hurt and betrayed and etc. that they will stop watching and other such mumblings. I have to say, that was a really effective way to drive a certain segment of the fandom away, Supernatural writers. Kudos if that was your goal.

I am perhaps being overly harsh and on a high horse. But this fandom is vying with the Twilight and Harry Potter fandoms for amounts of intense foolishness. Just a few days ago Delux pointed me to a Supernatural fan post where these girls were serving up some serious haterade because they went to an autographing session for one of the brothers and were appalled and angry that his girlfriend dared to be there! She harshed their fansquee! How dare she bring them all down by reminding them that he has sex with someone who is not them? Read it — you must understand the depths of entitlement and freakitude.

I’m sure many other TV shows have fandoms with completely inappropriate people like this. Now you know how to quell them! Go forth and write some episode wherein characters decide that incest is wrong and you will stomp on the hearts of non-balanced slashers everywhere.

(I should add here that I have no particular issue with fandom in general. I am a fandom, I have participated in fandoms, I enjoy fanfic sometimes, I love that people can love a show or book or movie or whatever so much that inspires them to do all sorts of cool stuff. But the rantings above are for times whe Fandom Goes Wrong.)

I don’t have a problem with the Wincest–I actually love the fact than SPN slash means you either write incest or RPF. What makes this wank hilarious is the indignation of fans who seem to think that it’s insulting to suggest that other people might not share their opinion.

I’m not going to try to argue that those Supernatural fans are in any way being sane or reasonable, but honestly, the concept of that episode weirded me out a bit. I mean, the vast vast majority of people who write Wincest know that real-life incest is a terrible idea, they aren’t upset by the actors having girlfriends, they don’t expect Wincest to happen on the show; they’re reasonable people with one ridiculous hobby and by and large they know how ridiculous it is. So if it were me (it’s not; I’ve had some slash fandoms, but not Supernatural) I’d feel intensely embarrassed if my favorite show came out and said to me on national television, “We know you’re there, and you’re hella creepy.”

Every fannish object develops the fandom it deserves. If the show-writers were not historically so reactive to the fandom — perforce the loudest, thus the craziest, segments thereof — then the fannish entitlement would be much less widespread. But the show itself has normalized a relationship where fannish desire can directly affect what occurs onscreen, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that fans of lesser… perspective… would assume that all their desires should become canon.

The sad part is that a writer engaging with fans that directly almost always makes for crappy story. It certainly makes for a story that loses comprehensibility (and relevance) as soon as the fannish context is gone by. It was lame and crappy storytelling when Aaron Sorkin did it on West Wing; it’s still lame and crappy storytelling now. Even the satisfaction of rebuking a small segment of one’s audience cannot be worth that compromise of quality.

What’s odd is that, for a very long time, TPTB have taken great joy in creating Wincest moments that everyone in the show acknowledges except the brothers.

I think it has less to do with the SPN slash and more to do with the Jared/Jensen RPS. As one of the FW links amusingly notes: “I have no idea what to do with the fact that Sam and Dean getting together because they found slash about themselves on the internet is now exactly as plausible as Jensen and Jared getting together because they found slash about themselves on the internet.”

Yeah, reading that wank through my friends of friends list was just… amazing. Supernatural fandom is this perfect little bubble of fannish entitlement right now. And by “right now”, I mean “for the past year and a half, or thereabouts.

It’s got a lot of batshit fans for a show with very little name recognition.

Okay, I don’t know that I’ve ever watched more than half an episode of Supernatural, but I did happen to see the first half of that one. (minor correction to your post, while attempting to avoid spoilers: it’s not that there’s a fan of theirs out there writing about their adventures, it’s that there’s a series of books of their adventures written by someone who has no idea they exist, and *those* books have a fandom.)

And, you know? I think they avoided the usual metafictional suck traps and pulled off some good television. Their one encounter with an extreme fan was played more for the protags’ surreal experience than for laughs at the fan’s expense (though there was one of those, at the end of the scene). As for the “ick, slash” conversation, it seemed fairly solidly in-character, but the overall effect seemed like more of a shout-out than a rebuke.

I may have been won over in these opinions by a later reference to Kurt Vonnegut that name-dropped Slaughterhouse-5, Cat’s Cradle, and Kilgore Trout.

A particular subset of this fandom once showed up on statements (which is a fan-friendly space by and large) literally weeks after someone had made a statement that they found it disturbing that there was a comm specifically for Supernatural incest spanking fic, and pitched an absolute hissyfit that the community still remembers as “spankwank” (and which may or may not have resulted in the community, which exists for the writing of single declarative sentences, to start posting single-declarative-sentence spankfic about the show, all of which ended in “and it was hot.”) The true hilarity is that the poster who made the oh-so-inflammatory original statement? Writes original fiction featuring prominent BDSM themes. But the idea that anyone might find it off or unsettling that there was enough interest in that specific manifestation of various kinks to support a community was so horrifying they had to tell everyone they knew to come over to statements and start telling her what a bad bad person she was.

My opinion of Supernatural fandom had previously been based entirely on its statements representatives, who indulged in normal fansquee and linked to fic occasionally – about par for the course in that comm. I haven’t forgotten that batshit, and since then have noticed that there seems to be quite a bit of it in that fandom.

You got it right girl. But I just really want to comment on the last statement you made. Don’t get me wrong, I myself do get crazy from time to time when I’m really really hooked. I give meaning to the word obsessed! But I do find it appalling how other fans go way way over the line. Oh well, that’s probably one of the reasons their show is such a hit

I'm a speculative fiction writer by night, a media critic and culture columnist by day, and an activist blogger in the interstices. I enjoy science fiction, fantasy, short stories, harshing your squee about that thing you love, and squeeing hard about that thing I love, in that order.